Drill Instructor Lived This Script

July 10, 1987|By Aljean Harmetz, New York Times

HOLLYWOOD — Lee Ermey's dialogue as a vicious Marine sergeant in Full Metal Jacket is a poisonous torrent of obscenities spewed onto terrified recruits. Much of the language is his own invention, remembered from his boot camp days as a 17- year-old farm boy and refined in the 30 months he served as a Marine Corps drill instructor during the Vietnam War.

There are times when a role and an actor cannot be separated, when art picks up life by the scruff of the neck and throws it onto the screen: Harold Russell, whose hands were blown off in World War II, playing a handless sailor in The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946; Dr. Haing Ngor, a Cambodian refugee, playing the deadly games of The Killing Fields; Dexter Gordon, a jazz musician whose life has been scarred by alcohol, playing an alcoholic saxophonist in 'Round Midnight.

Ermey's 11-year career as a Marine was ended by a rocket north of Da Nang in 1969. He will not talk about the war.

''If a person's wife and children were killed in a terrible automobile accident, 20 years later it will bother him to talk about it,'' he said.

But Ermey still is obsessed by the war, buying each new Vietnam novel immediately and throwing half of them away in disgust after reading the first chapter. He is trying to write a Vietnam novel himself, and he has made a career out of helping to put the Vietnam War on film, as technical adviser on Apocalypse Now, The Boys in Company C, Purple Hearts and now Full Metal Jacket, a Stanley Kubrick film that follows some members of a platoon from their boot camp haircuts to their deaths during the Tet offensive.

Ngor and Russell won Academy Awards for their performances and disappeared into the real world. Gordon was nominated for an Oscar this year, a detour from his career as a musician. For Ermey, acting is the right career at the right time.

''I love being in front of the camera,'' he said. ''I get to play cowboy.'' After all, what is a drill instructor but an actor? ''Nobody can be that nasty,'' he said.

When Ermey asked if he could audition for the part of Gunnery Sgt. Hartman in Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick told him he wasn't vicious enough. So Ermey made up his own audition. He insulted, ridiculed and harassed the British soldiers he was interviewing for roles as Marine recruits. The interviews were videotaped. ''Stanley liked the dialogue so much he had it typed up, 45 pages,'' Ermey said, ''and he used some of it in the film.''

Ermey never rehearsed with Matthew Modine, Vincent D'Onofrio, Arliss Howard or the other members of the film's platoon. When the camera rolled and he spewed out invective, he said, ''It was terrifying to those actors.''

''My objective was intimidation,'' he said. ''No one had ever invaded their private space. No one had ever put his head close to them. The first time I came up to Vincent, all he had to say was 'Yes, sir' and 'No, sir,' and he was so shocked he blew his lines three or four times.''

For Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick had asked Ermey to create a boot camp that was ''the closest thing to a documentary,'' and, Ermey said, ''It's all real.'' Reality extends to the dog clippers used to shear the recruits in the movie's opening scene. When Kubrick couldn't find clippers that sheared close enough, Ermey called a friend at the Marine Corps training base at Parris Island, S.C. -- the Marine base simulated in the movie -- and was told to use clippers designed for French poodles.

That does not imply that Gunnery Sgt. Hartman is Staff Sgt. Ermey. ''Heaven forbid!'' the actor said, looking mild and jaunty in a black-and- white checked jacket and a shirt with tiny flowers. ''I love people. Hartman was warped: too rough, too harsh, too demanding. But he was real.''

Born in Kansas, Ermey moved to Washington state at the age of 11. He enlisted in the Marines as soon as he graduated from high school, intending to spend 30 years in the Marine Corps. Boot camp didn't change his mind. ''I was strong,'' he said. ''I had five brothers, and my father was a strict disciplinarian. I got a beating every day whether I needed it or not. And I was a good shot. I was a country boy, so I knew how to shoot.''

In 1969, with his back and arm laced with shrapnel, he spent four months in a hospital, and then used his sick pay to buy a brothel on Okinawa that he turned into a drinking club. But he said he found it ''boring to stay in one place too long'' and moved to the Philippines, where he married, went to college briefly, and did television commercials for what he calls ''macho merchandise'' -- rum, watches, blue jeans and running shoes.

Then Francis Coppola went to the Philippines to make Apocalypse Now, and Ermey's life was changed.

''I drank as much as I could hold and I smoked as much as I could manage,'' Ermey said of the landscape of his life. Now the whiskey and the cigarettes are gone, and a new attitude has taken their place. ''When I want a cigarette, I run around the block a few times. I want to live to be very, very old.''

These days he plays golf, fishes for bass and trout with his 5-year-old son and raises ''hundreds of different cactus'' at his house on the edge of a southern California desert. And he waits.

''Of course, I want a career as an actor,'' he said. ''There are two years of my life missing in a resume. So I don't have anywhere else to go.''